1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for presenting data in a limited display area and, in particular displaying only a portion of the data for a field of data and a graphical element indicating that there is a second portion of the displayed data which may be displayed in response to user input.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the prior art, many programs and Internet web sites display information using hover text to conserve screen display real estate. One prior art use of hover text in application programs is to display information on a control button or icon. FIG. 1 illustrates a use of hover text 2 to display information on the operation of the “Reload” button. This information is static information provided for particular icons and control buttons on the page. Another prior art use of hover text is to display the entire content in a display area if the display area is not large enough to display all the content. Typically, the display area crops the content to display only that part of the content that fits into the display area. If a user moves a mouse over the display area, then the display area will display in a hover text box the entire content of the display area. The use of hover text is implemented in standard page description languages such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML provides an alternate text command that allows the display of text over an image. Details of HTML are described in the publication “HTML 4.0 Specification,” W3C Recommendation, revised Apr. 24, 1998 (Copyright World Wide Web Consortium 1998), which publication is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Another prior art example of the use of hover text is in the Microsoft Windows NT and 95/98** operating systems. These operating systems display a task bar that displays buttons for each open application that includes the application title. If the title would extend beyond the width of the application button, then the operating system displays the application title truncated to fit into the button. If the user passes a graphical pointer over the displayed application button, then the entire application title will be displayed in hover text over the application button.
Although the above uses of hover text to display data in fixed length content areas are well known, it would be desirable to utilize the hover text feature to further improve displaying of data in fixed length content areas.